The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

from Sicily. The objects would be stored in his apartment, he said, for months or longer, and then, acting on instructions, he would pack the antiquities into boxes and mail them abroad from the post office on the ground floor beneath his apartment. (The man in charge of the post office below confirmed later that Zicchi had indeed been sending packages abroad “for years.”) The objects were almost always sent out in fragments, Zicchi said. That way they occupied less space, drew less attention to themselves, and should the package break open for any reason, a collection of untidy pieces looked much less suspicious. Zicchi also said that he had met Pasquale Camera when the latter had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza and had been tipped off about him. Instead of prosecuting Zicchi, the two men had become close colleagues.
    The second discovery in Zicchi’s apartment was Camera’s passport. Together with the fact that Camera’s own apartment was in someone else’s name, as were several of his telephones, this confirmed—if confirmation were still needed—the lengths to which Camera would go to hide from official notice. He kept his profile as low as he possibly could, consistent with being able to travel abroad to further his business interests, and to bank his profits from those interests. Otherwise, Camera didn’t exist.
    The investigators took away about sixty objects at the end of that first
raid on Zicchi’s apartment. They had in mind a second raid, on the grounds that, as Conforti pointed out, having been raided once Zicchi would think he was safe. Before they could do so, however, Conforti received a phone call from an archaeologist at the Villa Giulia, Rome’s Etruscan museum. This was Daniela Rizzo, an archaeologist at the museum who worked closely with the Art Squad, verifying whether allegedly looted objects were genuine or not and, if genuine, where they had most probably been looted from. This time, she was calling to say that she had been contacted by an old woman who said that her son had just inherited a collection of antiquities and was anxious to have her—Rizzo—come and see them, authenticate them, and register them, so he could possess them legally (this is how the system works in Italy). Rizzo was being so pressurized, she said, with the old woman so adamant that she verify and register the objects “at once,” that she was becoming suspicious.
    What was the name of this woman, queried Conforti. More to the point, who was her son?
    â€œHis name is Danilo Zicchi,” said Rizzo.
    This was interesting. “How many objects does he want to register?”
    â€œAbout eighty, I think.”
    Even more interesting. Sixty objects had been seized. Now, by some lucky “accident,” Zicchi had “inherited” another eighty.
    The upshot was that Rizzo agreed to pay Zicchi a visit the following day to “inspect” his objects. She was accompanied by a “colleague,” who was of course an investigator from Conforti’s Art Squad, in plainclothes. More investigators remained down on the street, ready to swoop once they got the word.
    In fact, that day they discovered something incomparably more important than eighty looted antiquities, something that provided one of three starting points for the overall investigation that gave rise to this book (this was the second starting point, after the theft at Melfi). This discovery was kept top secret from everybody except Conforti and the Rome public prosecutor. In Zicchi’s apartment, in a file on a desk, just sitting there, was a single handwritten sheet of lined paper, with two punched holes on the left-hand side so it would fit into a ring binder. The sheet was covered in Pasquale Camera’s handwriting, and it was nothing less than an organizational chart showing how the clandestine antiquities network was
arranged throughout Italy, Switzerland, and elsewhere.