Free Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch

HE TRUE STORY of Frel's ignominious departure was kept very quiet within the museum. Only a handful of senior people were told: those who had to know and others who would have figured it out on their own. Outside the museum, von Bothmer was persuaded to remain silent with the argument that any leak could destroy Frel's pride or his ability to work as a scholar.
    Meanwhile, there was much to celebrate. Williams proved to be a cunning gamesman in the Getty Oil sale. After helping to lock in a bid at $112.50 a share from Pennzoil, Williams cleverly used the trust's shares to broker an even more attractive $125-a-share offer from Texaco. But he agreed to do so only if Texaco indemnified the trust against any legal action. As expected, Pennzoil sued, winning an unprecedented $11 billion judgment that nearly bankrupted Texaco. The Getty Trust, meanwhile, banked a check for $1.165 billion.
    With total assets now at about $2 billion, the Getty was not just the world's richest museum; it was also the world's second-largest charitable trust, after the Ford Foundation. Williams later told his friends that the Getty Oil deal was the smartest thing he ever did.
    Flush with money and promise, the Getty Trust expanded its vision. Williams launched a grant program, buying goodwill with multimillion-dollar gifts to several local museums. The Getty built a photography collection nearly overnight with the purchase of three major collections, its first expansion beyond J. Paul Getty's initial collecting mandate, which had excluded contemporary art.
    Williams and the board invited leading architects to bid on designs for a new central campus that would unite the Getty Museum and the trust's other programs, which were scattered throughout Los Angeles. It was projected to cost $150 million. The board eventually selected Richard Meier of New York, a Pritzker Prize—winning architect, for the job.
    The new Getty Center would be built atop 110 acres of one of the most visible bluffs in Brentwood, overlooking the perpetually jammed Interstate 405. The plan called for art collections at the Getty Museum in Malibu to be moved "up the hill" to the more than one million new square feet of office and exhibit space. The burgeoning antiquities collection would stay in Malibu and become the centerpiece of a transformed Getty Villa. It would be the only museum in America dedicated to ancient Greek and Roman art.
    The future looked bright. Only the lingering issues in the antiquities department threatened to destroy the new image the Getty was carefully cultivating. With Frel gone, Houghton set about cleaning up his predecessor's considerable curatorial mess. There were some eight hundred objects with little or no documentation. The records that did exist were peppered with fraudulent purchase prices, forged appraisals, bogus donor names, improbable attributions, and mythical provenances. Determining what, if anything, was true in the files became a Herculean task.
    Houghton started walking through the galleries with experts, identifying objects of questionable authenticity. On their first round, they identified six potential fakes, including two—a bust attributed to the ancient Greek sculptor Scopas and an archaic funerary relief—that Frel had convinced the board to buy for about $2.5 million each. After scientific tests confirmed them as fakes, the pieces were quietly taken off display and given the designation "AK," the museum's code for a forgery. The value of each was reduced on the books from millions to hundreds of dollars. Either Frel had been fooled repeatedly or had taken to advising the Getty to buy fakes on purpose, likely in exchange for some cut of the purchase price.
    Amid the cleanup, the threat of an IRS investigation lingered. In particular, donations from the two prominent Hollywood attorneys Ziffren and Brittenham hung over the museum like a cloud. Museum records showed that in 1982, the two attorneys had donated eleven objects