Big Business : Art Thieves Find Italy Is a Gold Mine

One of the most closely studied art catalogues in Europe, and perhaps the world’s most tasteful wanted poster, is a handsome volume published here by the Carabinieri, Italy’s militarized national police.

The current edition, with a cover showing a pair of bronze handles from the 4th Century BC, is a 131-page wonderland of paintings, sculptures, porcelains, wood carvings, illuminated manuscripts and valuable antiques ranging from mantle clocks to altar pieces.

What unites a collection eclectic enough to include a 2nd-Century marble bust, paintings by Bruegel, Hogarth and Tiepolo, a 16th-Century chest of drawers and seven 19th-Century chalices, is that everything in it has been stolen.

Testament to the Times

The police catalogue is testament to the times. Art theft is an accelerating, multimillion-dollar business today in Mediterranean countries such as Italy that were the center of early Western civilization. This month, while an Italian magistrate asserted that several pieces of archaic Greek sculpture clandestinely excavated in 1979 at Morgantina, Sicily, had wound up at the Getty Museum in Malibu, thieves slipped into a church in the Sicilian city of Catania and made off with 14 valuable 18th-Century paintings.

Pawing busily through the debris and splendor of so many civilizations, so many centuries, art thieves around the Mediterranean have never had more resources or a better market. Never have there been as many people willing to pay so much for pilfered art as in post-industrial societies where everything is collectible and there is ego and money aplenty to pay for it.

Urban, Rural Thieves

Greece and Turkey are also prime thieves’ targets, but for rude country diggers and slick city burglars alike, Italy is the Mecca.

“All of Italy is a museum, a work of art. Nobody even knows how much art there really is,” said Maj. Luigi Bacceli, the chief of Carabinieri art detectives.

Bacceli compares the task of trying to stop stolen art from leaving Italy with American attempts to keep drugs from entering the United States: “Look at the map--thousands of miles of coasts, thousands of vehicles each day across the land frontiers, an hour by plane to Zurich. What should we do, build a fence around the country? Can Florida keep out the drugs? We do the best we can, protecting what there is and recovering what is stolen.”

In a country that wears successive layers of history like makeup on a winsome face, the scale of Italy’s artistic riches is matched only by the astonishing scale of their theft. Nearly a quarter of a million pieces have been stolen since 1970, according to chief government auditor Raffaele Cappielo, who bemoans “an alarming increase” in recent years.

Since the latest Carabinieri catalogue, the 12th edition, was distributed to art dealers in 1986, thieves have stolen art objects from churches, museums and private collections in Italy at the rate of more than one an hour--40 per day.

By police count, 23,128 art pieces were stolen in 1,466 robberies during the 18-month period ending June 30. That is 2 1/2 times as many art objects as were stolen in a similar period during 1981-82.

“Remember that dozens of pieces may be taken in a single robbery, or hundreds in the case of coins,” Bacceli cautioned. In the 18-month period, police recovered just over a third--8,469--of the stolen objects, and arrested 850 people.

Enormous Haul

The 1987-88 haul, according to the Carabinieri figures, has so far included 4,400 paintings, 1,987 sculptures, 723 archeological pieces and 13,938 antiques and ecclesiastical objects. Private collectors lost two-thirds of the total, but 4,467 works of art were stolen from 695 Italian churches and another 2,300 were taken in 173 thefts from public and private museums.

“I can’t understand people groveling around in the mud hunting things to dig up when most of our churches and museums are like supermarkets. Walk the aisles with a shopping cart and take what you like,” said the jaded and publicity-shy curator of a provincial museum where exotic electronics have, belatedly, fought local thieves to a draw.

Museums of dazzling scope sprinkled around the country in both big cities and small are tough enough to guard. In a never-ending swirl of worshipers and tourists, protecting Italy’s churches is a nightmare. Virtually all of them house valuable paintings and sculpture. Few boast the sort of security that protects Michelangelo’s Pieta and its artistic brethren at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Visitors to Anticoli Corrado, a hill town lost in the Abruzzi mountains, are quickly shown where the tiny village church’s 11th-Century German cross was until someone walked off with it a few years ago.

Paintings are the favorite of urban thieves. Sometimes particular works are stolen to order. Paintings are easy to hide, easy to transport, easy to smuggle and easy to resell, if they are not too famous. Fame is a kind of reverse insurance policy. Sometimes when thieves realize they have stolen a piece so well known that it is impossible to sell, police receive an anonymous call saying where it is being abandoned.

Some Big Finds

Carabinieri detectives, who use everything from helicopters to phone taps to undercover agents, have had particularly good luck with big-name paintings. They recovered a group of masterpieces, including a Raphael, stolen from the Ducal Palace in Urbino in 1975 and were instrumental in tracing seven Renaissance paintings taken from a Budapest museum in 1983.

Topping the Carabinieri’s most-wanted list at present is Caravaggio’s “Nativity of Christ,” stolen 19 years ago from a church in Palermo, Sicily, and apparently now held, the police believe, by the Mafia.

By far the most romantic of Italy’s art thieves are the moonlight diggers. Tombaroli is what they are called in areas around Rome where they loot ancient tombs. Elsewhere they are clandestini , as in Sicily, where they harvest remnants left by successive waves of invaders since Greek times.

“People with jobs don’t dig. Poor people dig because they dream that one lucky find can change their lives. They do enormous archeological damage,” said Silvio Raffiotta, a Sicilian judge and amateur archeologist who has jailed more than 40 clandestini so far this year after raids at their homes recovered booty from the ancient Greek city at Morgantina.

Holes in the Ground

Every year uncounted thousands of art objects are whisked away by night from archeological sites as varied as Etruscan necropolises north of Rome and Morgantina, where there are so many freshly turned holes that it looks as if the ground had been shelled.

Newly dug treasures of illicit archeology, from coins to life-sized statues, figure in no catalogue. Until they surface, sometimes in museums and private collections abroad, they are known only to the treasure hunters who find them and the collectors who buy them: shadowy provincial middlemen in shiny suits at one extreme, and uptown American museum directors at the other.

Pepe, a Rome art dealer with a one-man shop, knows the feeling when, with a deep breath and abiding faith in his own expertise, a middleman forks over money for an object of doubtful provenance. He says the path of stolen artifacts from ancient site to sanctuary from Italian police, typically in Switzerland, is well known and easily traveled.

“Usually the clandestini sell cheap to local dealers, who move the goods along to the big cities, then to Switzerland if it is leaving the country,” Pepe said. “In the case of something spectacular like the Morgantina statues, though, the dealer would come from Switzerland himself and buy on the spot. Transport is his risk.”

Clandestine Dig

Interpol investigators tracing a 5th-Century BC Aphrodite, recently unveiled by the Getty, believe that it wound its way over time from a clandestine dig in southern Italy to a Sicilian dealer in Switzerland to a London dealer. In clearing the statue though U.S. Customs, the Getty declared a value of $20 million for it.

Like many of his ilk, Pepe is a charming, polyglot soul with an amusing line of patter and a canny eye for an old figurine or an Etruscan vase: “Small things only, just small things, please. Big things can be dangerous.”

Pepe owns a fast car and can make it from central Italy to Germany in one day, no sweat--except at the border checkpoints, where he smiles a lot and trusts to odds sharply in his favor.

“For small things, no problem--thousands of cars every day and no time or inclination to check them,” Pepe said, shrugging. “Even for big things. . . . Who will delay hundreds of trucks to look for a marble statue among a couple hundred refrigerators on one truck?”

Papers Needed for Export

Under Italian law, all underground wealth, including artifacts of any sort, belongs to the state. Further, works of art may be exported only with written permission of the Culture Ministry. Thus, artifacts of Italian origin that turn up outside the country without such papers are presumed to have been both stolen and smuggled.

What breaks Italian, Greek or Turkish law, however, does not necessarily trouble the Swiss. Reputable dealers in Switzerland will want to know the provenance of a piece and demand the export certificate from the country that it came from, but Swiss law does not require either, according to a spokesman for the Justice Ministry in Bern.

Switzerland has never subscribed to a convention of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization that forbids the importation of art objects without an export license, and, according to Italian experts, there is no shortage of Swiss dealers willing to sell newly arrived pieces with no questions asked. Neither is there any lack of collectors and big museums willing to buy them, they say.

Smuggling a stolen artifact into Switzerland effectively launders it if it is newly found and unrecorded. Such may have been the case, investigators believe, with a bronze Roman breastplate from the 3rd Century BC that was written about in the Getty Museum’s journal in 1986.

Getty Sought to Return It

According to Lori Starr, the Getty’s press officer, a breastplate matching that description was loaned to the museum by a private collector for study purposes. Last January, Starr said, the Malibu police, acting on behalf of Interpol, contacted the museum and obtained the owner’s name and documentation. Since then, the Getty has tried to return the piece but the collector has not responded, she said. Citing museum policy, she declined to reveal the provenance of the piece or the collector’s name.

Unless a compelling case can be made to prove theft, recovery by an aggrieved country is a distant prospect, although Italy has had a few victories and Turkey last year sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for recovery of gold and silver pieces from the 6th Century BC that it claims were smuggled from the country.

Unlike newly found objects, previously catalogued pieces have a tough time finding a new home. Their only realistic hope of sale is to a private collector. Even if a work of art wanders into Switzerland, no museum would easily touch it if it is known to have been stolen. That is one reason the Carabinieri catalogue and other such telltales are so closely studied in the art world.

Virgin archeological pieces, by contrast, are another matter. There are museum-sized gaps between presuming an object was illicitly excavated and smuggled and proving it to the satisfaction of courts thousands of miles and many borders away from where they were found in the dark of night.

The lively international demand for bits of yesterday is the crucial element in the emerging golden age of the Mediterranean night diggers.

Aided by Technology

There have been villages of sporadic diggers in places such as Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Italy for centuries, but only recently has technology come to the diggers’ aid: as a tribe, diggers dream of gold, silver and bronze. Marble is fine, but most terra cotta is for breaking.

Portable metal detectors, which first became generally and reasonably available in the mid-1970s, are now as common as flush toilets in Mediterranean villages that were mired in poverty and medieval isolation only half a century ago.

On the heels of the metal detectors have come all-terrain vehicles, lanterns that stay lit with trusty alkaline batteries, warm jackets, good raincoats, wondrous boots that keep feet dry and, critically, an awareness of the outside world that includes the recognition that old things buried in the nearby countryside may be worth a lot of money. Glossy art books in a country family’s cottage is one sure sign of an after-dark hobby.

All known archeological sites are protected by the Italian government, but experience has proved that the night watchmen at many of them are nearsighted.

One foreign archeologist grew so outraged at the metal detector-led pillage near his dig that he urged Italian officials to combat the detectors by sowing the site with thousands of metal washers.

A History of Looting

Often, farmers and villagers know better than archeologists where to dig in any given area. More, they have known for centuries. Everybody from the ancient Romans to Napoleonic-era soldiers to 19th-Century tourists looted Etruscan tombs north of Rome.

Local gossip that clandestini had found marble parts of two archaic statues of female goddesses at Morgantina in 1979--the pieces that Italian investigators say wound up at the Getty, which then quickly returned them to the private collector who had loaned them--prompted the Italian government to set a team of real archeologists digging in the same area. They found hundreds of terra-cotta figurines left by the goddesses’ worshipers 2,600 years ago.

Robbing tombs has been against the law in Italy only for the past 50 years. It is punishable by up to six years in jail.

Malcolm Bell, the University of Virginia archeologist in charge of a dig at Morgantina by American universities that has been under way for 33 years, spends bemused summers living in the nearby, many-shovel town of Aidone.

“When somebody makes a strike, it hits the town like an electric current. Everybody knows immediately,” Bell said.

A Better Way of Life

The whole town also knows that a big hit can mean a new car, a better way of life. What is true at Aidone is also a fact of life around the ancient Etruscan capital of Tarquinia, where the slickest tombaroli anybody has ever met is known as “Il Mago” (the Magician) for his wizardry with the T-shaped, tomb-probing metal bar called a spillo , literally, a “pin.”

A legendary Aidone digger nicknamed Mangia Lepre (Rabbit Eater) found something so valuable at Morgantina one night that, with the proceeds, he bought a fancy new house, retiring to it, peasant no more, with a new-found sense of achievement and an inflated self-esteem.

As Bell tells the story, that is what killed him, for one night Rabbit Eater became so abusive of village children who disturbed his rest that their fathers beat him to death.

Bell finds an important moral there, but Rabbit Eater’s disciples aren’t listening. All around the Mediterranean, they will be digging again tonight in fresh assault on the buried legacy of history.