Free Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch Page A

to the Getty. But Houghton had since learned that their signatures had been forged, probably by Frel. The museum was now in a quandary about what to do with the objects.
    The issue was sensitive enough to be handled directly by Williams, who ordered the objects returned to McNall without notifying the board or the IRS. Bevan, the Getty's attorney, approved the move. He didn't think the IRS would cause a problem unless it concluded that there had been a conspiracy to commit tax fraud. But he was concerned enough to suggest that all the documents "relating to Frel's corruption" be gathered and removed from the building so they couldn't be subpoenaed.
    With that, the cover-up appeared complete.

4. WORTH THE PRICE
    I N ADDITION TO the tax fraud scheme, Houghton had inherited Frel's greatest discovery and a disturbing archaeological puzzle.
    Sitting in the Getty's conservation laboratory was a seven-foot-tall marble Greek kouros, or statue of a nude young man. The face bore the vague smile that was a signature detail of the archaic period, the end of the sixth century B.c. The man's hands were pinned stiffly to his sides, with one foot slightly forward, in a pose Greek sculptors had borrowed from the Egyptians. Dozens of such statues had dotted ancient Greece as votive offerings, grave markers, or tributes to the god Apollo. Today they were among the most prized objects of ancient art, with only a dozen known to have survived intact. This would be the thirteenth—if it was authentic.
    Frel had produced a sheaf of documents suggesting that the kouros had been owned by the family of a Geneva doctor since the 1930s but never exhibited or studied. Still, it was a far more complete ownership history than existed for most antiquities considered by the Getty. The person offering the statue was Gianfranco Becchina, a Sicilian antiquities dealer whose Swiss gallery was a major source of material for the Getty. Becchina wanted $10 million for the kouros—far more than the Getty had ever paid for an antiquity.
    In December 1983, the trustees gathered in the conservation lab to see the sculpture. In one of his last presentations as curator, Frel had extolled it as "the greatest example of ancient art in the world," a piece badly needed to fill a gap in the Getty's antiquities collection. When the curator finished, one trustee erupted.
    "But this is an incredible joke!" exclaimed Federico Zeri, the esteemed Italian art historian. He attacked the kouros with troubling specificity, pointing to a flaw in the marble in the statue's forehead. No ancient sculptor would have chosen such a flawed piece of marble for such an important work, Zeri cried. And the fingernails were too realistic, reflecting a naturalism not found in Greek sculpture until a much later period.
    "Marvelous. Extremely complex," he told his stunned colleagues. "But it's clearly a fake."

    Z ERI'S DENUNCIATION ONLY added to concerns that Walsh and Williams had been quietly harboring about the kouros.
    Williams, a lawyer by training, was troubled by potential legal problems raised by the statue. In all of Frel's paperwork, there was no indication of where the statue had been found or how it had left its country of origin. Frel had suggested that it had been smuggled out of Athens by a notorious looter in the 1930s—long enough ago that Greece was unlikely to raise any legal claim. But what if Frel was wrong about the Greeks, Williams wanted to know. And how could the museum justify buying any antiquities in a market where, he was being told, much of the supply had been recently looted and illegally exported? "Indeed," he complained to Walsh, "much of the conversation is to the effect that 90% of the objects on the market are presumed to have been recently come out of Italy or Greece." He asked for a detailed briefing on the legal implications and how other museums handled the issue.
    Walsh's concerns focused more on public perception. Such a large, important