Treasure Hunt The downfall of the Getty curator Marion True (Q63366708)
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New Yorker article
- Treasure Hunt
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Treasure Hunt The downfall of the Getty curator Marion True |
New Yorker article |
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Statements
Treasure Hunt The downfall of the Getty curator Marion True (English)
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Today, True, who is fifty-nine, is best known as the target of a sprawling carabinieri investigation of American museums and the illegal antiquities market. In April, 2005, she was indicted in Rome, charged with conspiracy to traffic in tens of millions of dollars’ worth of looted Greek vases, Etruscan bronzes, terracottas, and other objects. True allegedly obtained these artifacts through an international network run by the American antiquities dealer Robert E. Hecht, Jr., who is a co-defendant in her case, and by an Italian dealer named Giacomo Medici, who was convicted of trafficking in 2004, and who was described in his sentencing documents as perpetrating “one of the greatest thefts against the Italian state ever recorded.” According to the prosecution, the conspiracy involved top dealers and private collectors in London and New York, along with art restorers in Zurich, middlemen in Geneva, and tomb robbers and smugglers in Italy. True denies any wrongdoing. (English)
10 December 2007
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“Marion True had a double nature,” Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the state prosecutor in the Italian case, says. “Not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but very similar.” Weeks before the trial began, in the fall of 2005, True lost her job at the Getty, after she disclosed that she had taken a loan from Lawrence Fleischman, a well-known antiquities collector based in New York, to help pay for a vacation home on the Greek island of Paros; she obtained the loan just days after Fleischman’s collection, which he had amassed with his wife, Barbara, was acquired by the museum, in a deal worth sixty million dollars. In March and April, 2006, Greek police conducted a series of raids on the Paros house, and confiscated ancient stone objects and architectural fragments that they found on the premises. True was subsequently indicted in Athens on charges of trafficking three Greek antiquities owned by the Getty, including a fourth-century-B.C. gold wreath; the Getty has returned all three to Greece. (English)
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The Getty’s first antiquities curator, Jiri Frel, left his post in 1984 after a series of acquisition scandals. Most embarrassing, Frel had successfully pushed for the purchase of a stone kouros—a statue of a young man—that many experts now consider a modern forgery. (English)