Free The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson

Sotheby’s, never heard from Boursaud again, but he later realized that the range of goods consigned by the Hydra Gallery was much the same as those now being offered by a new gallery: Editions Services. In the July 1987 sale, there was a marble pilaster that had hitherto belonged to Hydra, had failed to sell, and was now being sold as the property of Editions Services. So there could now be no doubt: The Hydra Gallery had reinvented itself as Editions Services. Whoever was behind the companies was a prudent man. And the person behind the Hydra Gallery and Editions Services was one and the same: Giacomo Medici.
    Throughout the 1980s, Giacomo Medici probably sold more antiquities at Sotheby’s than any other single owner. Over the years, thousands of objects from Medici had passed through the London salesroom and millions of pounds had changed hands. None of the antiquities had any provenance because all were illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.
    There was more. The documentation supplied by Hodges showed that the registered address of Editions Services was 7 Avenue Krieg in Geneva,
and that it was registered in the name of Henri Albert Jacques. The documents showed that these details—Avenue Krieg and H. A. Jacques—were also used by another company that consigned many unprovenanced antiquities to Sotheby’s. This was a company called Xoilan Trader, Inc., the beneficial owner of which was Robin Symes. Other documents that Hodges took showed that Symes and Felicity Nicholson, boss of antiquities at Sotheby’s, had collaborated to smuggle a statue of the Egyptian Lion Goddess out of Italy. It was a cozy, close-knit world, which was exposed in a British TV program only days after the Carabinieri raid on Corridor 17.
    It was not long before Conforti got in touch with the British investigation.

    Why was it that police in Italy and journalists in Britain were in the same place, at the same time, investigating the same people engaged in the same illicit practices? To an extent, of course, it was an accident, the result of Hodges’s predicament at Sotheby’s. But there was a deeper reason, too, which accounted for why Hodges was able to observe what he did observe inside Sotheby’s. The fact is that attitudes toward, and laws about, dealing in unprovenanced (and therefore very probably illegally excavated and smuggled) antiquities have been steadily changing as views on morality have evolved over the years. Those countries that are the source of archaeological material—the civilizations around the Mediterranean, in Central and South America, West Africa, and Asia—have been taking an increasingly robust line to protect what they see as their heritage. This has partly to do with cultural identity in newly independent countries, in particular after World War II, and partly to do with tourism, because properly excavated archaeological sites can be major attractions, and therefore sources of revenue.
    Isolated attempts to control the movement of cultural property date back to early laws in Greece (1834), Italy (1872), and France (1887). After World War I, the newly formed League of Nations held discussions on the imposition of controls over the illicit exploitation of cultural property—in particular antiquities—but the resulting Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified. Throughout the 1930s, action on this topic at the League was coordinated
by the Office International des Musées (OIM). Although a draft “Convention on the Repatriation of Objects of Artistic, Historical or Scientific Interest, Which Have Been Lost, Stolen or Unlawfully Alienated or Exported” was prepared, there were strong objections from the art market countries (in particular the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and in 1939, with the outbreak of war, the initiative came to an end. After the war, in 1946, UNESCO took an interest in a convention to protect cultural property