Treasure Hunt.(Marion True)(Interview)

One afternoon in April, 1998, Marion True, the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, took a flight from Athens to Rome. When she got off the plane, a carabinieri officer was waiting for her. "He actually picked me up before passport control, just to show how important I was," she recalls. The officer drove her to the Raphael Hotel, near Piazza Navona; in her room, she found a giant bouquet from General Roberto Conforti, then the head of the carabinieri's cultural-heritage-protection force. Conforti had invited her to address an international police conference that he was hosting, on the circulation of stolen art. "This was his courting phase," True told me.

Now retired, General Conforti--often called simply Il Generale--is renowned in the international circle of beat cops, private detectives, insurance executives, customs agents, and state prosecutors involved in the recovery of stolen art. In the nineteen-nineties, he built up his squad into the largest of its kind in the world; he also set out to combat what he considered the most intractable problem in art crime. "It wasn't Picassos, and it wasn't Caravaggios," Conforti, who wears a mustache and speaks in a gravelly basso profundo, said when I met him in Rome, this fall. "It was antiquities." Freshly looted artifacts have no documented history, he pointed out, and criminal organizations were putting them on the international market with impunity; quality pieces could sell for seven or even eight figures. In 1995, True had persuaded the Getty to adopt ethical standards requiring objects proposed for acquisition to have been documented and written about by scholars, and Conforti hoped to enlist her in his efforts to retrieve improperly obtained Italian antiquities from the Getty and other American museums. "We thought the Getty was ready to work with us," Conforti said.

At the time, True was a frequent participant in Italian archeology conferences, where she talked about the "brutally direct evidence" of looting and about her efforts to change the Getty's image as the "most aggressively acquiring institution in the world." (The endowment of the J. Paul Getty Trust is $6.4 billion.) Paola Pelagatti, who is one of Italy's leading classical archeologists, says of True, "She made a big impression. She was extremely conscientious--direct in that strong American way." True, who is fair and has striking blue eyes, was also known for her elegant New England manners and her classic wardrobe. "She was very Waspish, very Bostonian," Mario Bondioli-Osio, an Italian diplomat who in the nineties ran a government commission on art recovery, says. "She kind of fit the Italian ideal of elegance, of the well-turned-out lady," says John Papadopoulos, a professor of archeology at U.C.L.A. and a former associate curator at the Getty, who travelled with her to Italy on several occasions.

At Conforti's conference, True addressed a group that included representatives of Scotland Yard, Interpol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Gendarmerie Nationale. "Among the things I talked about was a big cult statue, the Aphrodite," True says. Depicting a Greek goddess clad in billowing drapery, the statue was seven and a half feet tall and had been, as True said in her presentation, "one of the museum's most controversial acquisitions" when it was bought by the Getty from a London dealer, in 1988, for eighteen million dollars. A rare surviving example of late-fifth-century-B.C. sculpture, it had been created in an unusual manner: the covered body was limestone; the exposed head, arms, and feet were white marble. Its provenance was unknown, but reports had circulated in the American and the Italian press that it had been excavated recently at Morgantina, a frequently looted site in central Sicily.

"Despite the best efforts of the press, no evidence has come forward to this day to substantiate its suggested provenance of Morgantina," True said at the conference. "However, the statue does represent an important document in the history of monumental sculpture." She continued, "It is most certainly a product of a workshop in the western Greek colonies. For this reason, the museum has agreed to work with Italian colleagues on a complete technical study of the statue." In an effort to determine the Aphrodite's origin, True had sent limestone samples to geologists in Palermo. (The samples matched limestone found in Sicily, but the geologists could not identify a specific site.) In her presentation, True also mentioned several objects that the Getty had voluntarily repatriated after the museum determined that they had been stolen or illegally exported. Her lecture was applauded. "She spoke well," Conforti recalls.

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.

"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.